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From the same type of motherfucker who somehow both understands concepts like the scientific method and interpreting data, but will look at a 15% pass rate in their entry level classes and blame it on the students
Classic anecdote of the missing proof for Shizuo Kakutani’s lemma.
What happened then?
Actually seems like it might be an apocryphal story, based on my googling
I’m pretty sure everyone clapped.
Reminds me of studying my notes in school
Mathematicians frequently use phrases like It’s obvious or It’s easy to see, which can be profoundly discouraging for a student who does not immediately find a concept simple. In math, grappling with extremely difficult problems is part of the learning process. “A challenging experience,” Ardila told me, “can easily become an alienating one.” It’s especially important to make sure that students are not discouraged during early challenges—what’s hard to see now may become easier in time. He struck this typically demoralizing math language from his teaching.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2021/09/bias-math-sexism-racism/620207/
Most things are hard until you get them. But that’s especially true in Maths. From elementary school to university until the necessary neurons in your head connect every problem seems daunting at first. But once you see what the actual problem is, once you see what tricks can be used they become trivial to solve.
Chemistry was worse than math for me. Somehow they expected you to remember a variation of a formula from way far back, and understand that you could now use a different notation system to derive another, third formula from a new formula that you had just learned… but didn’t explain that and just threw that new third formula (with entirely different units/inputs) at you and it always was a slog to go track down how it all went together because the mental concepts just didn’t flow. I don’t even remember the name of the textbook or the professor of the class, but I still remember those stupid blue boxes in the textbook where mental mindfuck took place.
I’ve tutored calculus, and probably the biggest example I’ve seen of this is the difference quotient. The formula is exceedingly obvious once you understand it, but it takes a lot of people some time for it to “click”.
Sometimes you just need it explained like you are five or something that was explained earlier in the “concepts” section of the textbook needs to be explained explicitly during the problem demonstration sections. And on top of that repeated explanation of the same concept is another key factor in solidifying concepts but I’ve found math and physics books to be so lacking in this that it’s as if they are trying to hit the absolute minimum number of word count a textbook can have. Was very frustrating during college.
This is something I’ve been thinking about recently, I’ll see something that is way too complex for me, and think “well this person is just smarter I could never do that.” After 3 months of doing simpler stuff, it now seems challenging but doable, and I even see flaws in the way they did it. Just doing something for long enough, even pretty complex things become second nature.
Old joke.
Professor writes a formula on the blackboard. He says “Obviously, this is…” Then he stops, looks at the formula and rushes out of the room.
The next day class resumes. the professor walks in with a big smile on his face.
“I was correct. It is obvious!”
I’m too stupid for this
Obviously…
That one is “evidently”. It wasn’t obvious until you tried.
… obviously /s
that’s how athletes talk in interviews to avoid saying anything
Ah favorite words of professors everywhere
“obviously”
“simply”
“trivially”Not really funny, at least for me as a native German speaker. I mean the movie is great and this scene in particular but the subtitles don’t work if you understand what they say…
Might help if you mute it, but I can see how that would be jarring.
Helps a bit, thanks :)
Proof by intimidation
The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
Trivial.
Naive.
Elegant.
“Energy”.
“Entropy”.
I mean… lasers, man… how DO they work?“I’m Too Stupid For This.”
Amen!
“What?”If you have to tell someone something, it means the something is not obvious.
It’s so blatant!
the strangest yet most profound things find me while im on shrooms. or maybe that’s only when i start noticing them…
this post makes so much sense, yet the more i think about it the less sense it makes.
im gonna go touch grass and look at the electeic spiders and the strange webs they weave now
holy shit i solved it.
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS TO DO SOMETHING
well, i guess to do absolutely nothing and die is still something to do 🤷😅😂
chatgpt werks
